Civil rights activists to headline MTSU lecture

A group of about 3,000 demonstrators marches down Jefferson Street in Nashville in 1960. The Rev. C.T. Vivian, front row at left, and the Rev. James Lawson, covering his face with his handkerchief, will speak at MTSU on Sept. 17.(Photo: File / Gannett Tennessee)

MURFREESBORO — Two titans of the civil rights movement will discuss present-day civil rights challenges during a Constitution Day program at Middle Tennessee State University, according to an announcement from the university.

The Rev. James Lawson and the Rev. C.T. Vivian will headline a program called “No Voice, No Choice: The Voting Rights Act at 50” at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 17 in Tucker Theatre on the MTSU campus. Admission is free and open to the public.

“The work that civil rights leaders undertook 50 years ago continues today,” said Mary Evins, coordinator of the American Democracy Project at MTSU, in the release. “Students must know our history in order to protect their future.”

The voting rights panel featuring Lawson and Vivian is the keynote program of the university’s annual Constitution Day, which includes civic programming, Constitutional readings and voter registration drives, according to the release.

As trusted friends and advisers of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1950s and 1960s, Lawson and Vivian were instrumental in a number of key civil rights events during that era, according to the release..

“These gentlemen were literally on the front lines of the movement, so we’re thrilled they have agreed to come to the MTSU campus to not only share reflections of that seminal chapter in our nation’s history, but also to connect that history to today’s political landscape,” Evins said.

“We strongly encourage our students, the campus community and the wider community to join us for this special event.”

Aleia Brown, a MTSU doctoral student in public history, will moderate the lecture on Sept. 17. Brown was previously a curator at the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio.

Lawson has been a civil rights activist since his days at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, where he took part in sit-ins and freedom rides, and served a 14-month prison sentence for refusing to report for the draft as a conscientious objector, the release said. As a divinity student at Vanderbilt University, Lawson organized and led one of the most effective campaigns of 20th century nonviolent resistance — the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.

In the years that followed, he was involved in strategic planning of numerous major campaigns and actions, including the Freedom Rides to Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala., and the march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery. King called Lawson “the mind of the movement” and “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,” according to the release

Lawson, 86, lives in Los Angeles, where he was pastor of Holman United Methodist Church from 1974 until his retirement in 1999.

In November 2014, Vivian was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. Vivian, who grew up in central Illinois, participated in his first sit-in in Peoria, Ill., in 1947, the release said.

He moved to Nashville in 1955 to study at historically black American Baptist College. With Lawson and Kelly Miller Smith, Vivian founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, the first affiliate of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Vivian gained national attention on Feb. 15, 1965, on the steps of the county courthouse in Selma. He was punched in the jaw and knocked down by burly county sheriff Jim Clark after leading about 40 marchers in an attempt to vote, according to the release.

Vivian, 91, lives in Atlanta and has a leadership institute named after him.